Labour has a rare opportunity to engage the public with a more honest account of the trade-offs involved in a balanced migration policy
There is always more continuity in regime change than incoming ministers or their ousted predecessors admit. Much of any government’s agenda is dictated by the need to keep the state functioning from one day to the next, and that is less ideological than election campaigns make it seem. This is true even with an issue as fissile as immigration. On Wednesday, Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, confirmed that the government would press ahead with Conservative plans, first announced in 2022, to reopen two defunct immigration detention centres.
Ms Cooper said new capacity was required as part of a plan to accelerate the forced removal of thousands of migrants without entitlement to be in the UK. In addition, she announced the recruitment of 100 new intelligence officers to target people-smuggling gangs. This is intended to disrupt the traffic of small boats in the Channel that was the focus of the last government’s expensive, vindictive and ineffective Rwanda deportation scheme. That has rightly been scrapped.